Comments on: Urban astroninjashttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/
Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:12:45 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1By: Astronomy from the sidewalks of New York : Sweet Yummy Realityhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153615
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:44:41 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153615[…] via Bad Astronomy, this New York Times article: While Times Square is not known for star gazing — the celestial […]
]]>By: Jayhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153614
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:44:51 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153614I met Jason last month at Inwood Astronomy’s Lulin event, which attracted at least 80 people (who walked to the observing site at the top of a hill in a dark park at night!) and was a great success – despite the super-fuzziness of Lulin.

Since that event I have signed on to the sidewalk astronomy movement, sharing the skies in the northwest Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Check out what we’ve seen at riverdaleastronomy.blogspot.com. People have loved it!

]]>By: justcorblyhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153613
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:58:41 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153613Yes, yes, Craig, but I did not say our brains are more important, in an evolutionary sense, than an elephant’s trunk.

I’m not really looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, and I’m not really interested in how well-adapted other animals are. (If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be here to talk about.) Even the most adaptively evolved bacteria doesn’t have the ability to study and change its environment. It’s our ability to do that — we study bacteria, not the other way around — that makes us different. It is not the level of some creature’s evolution that interests me, but the creature’s capabilities. Nature may not agree, but I think being a thinking tool-making primate trumps eveverthing else.

Try it again in a few months, and let the conspiracists speculate on the “Saturn’s rings are really just a hoax” story.

]]>By: Craighttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153611
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:30:07 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153611@justcorbly: no, the trunks etc. give them entirely different abilities than the ones that our brains do. But declaring that brain-based abilities (which many other critters also have in part; any mammal brain is a fantastically impressive bit of biological “engineering”) are more important than any other sort of ability does seem a touch anthropocentric.

Yes, brains make us very adaptable and let us occupy a great variety of ecological niches. But single-celled organisms have us comprehensively stomped on both of those measures and countless multicellular creatures occupy larger areas than we do/live longer than we do/perceive things we can’t/survive in places we can’t/etc.

Those brains are also very expensive to maintain, metabolically speaking, and the “programming” time they require is the reason why human children are so horrifically vulnerable for so long. From a long-term objective point of view, economising on brain size is often a very sensible thing for an organism to do.

Humans do not occupy the majority of the Earth’s surface; it’s under water. We only live on the skin of the onion; life continues down into the very bedrock. We exist on a tiny membrane wedged between boiling lava and radioactive vacuum, and imagine that we’re masters of the universe.

If anything is the current pinnacle of evolution, everything is: a 21st century ape or bacteria or tree is just as “evolved” as we are. The great apes aren’t humanity’s ancestors; they are our cousins. We both “descended” from the same thing; we just ended up living in different ecological niches.

]]>By: VickyHarresAkershttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153610
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:22:38 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153610It struck me as so incredibly sad when I read that 2/3 of people in the US live in places where the sky is not dark enough to see the Milky Way. And how many people wouldn’t know what it was? I smile everytime I see it. It’s a reminder that we are part of something much bigger.
]]>By: jrhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153609
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:30:51 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153609Dumb question:

]]>By: csrsterhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153607
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:57:21 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153607“It’s much the same as when some folks claim that evolution teaches that we are all descended (note the negative implications of that word) from other primates, while some of us are proudly aware and amazed that we are the pinnacle of an amazing process. At least, so far.”

Are there negative implications of the word descended? I’m also descended from nomadic desert shepherds but I don’t feel either degraded or uplifted by that fact. Nor do I consider our species the pinnacle of evolution so far. Yes we have the biggest intellect, but elephants have better trunks. _We_ think intellect is more important than a good long trunk, but then we would, wouldn’t we?

(Incidentally I sometimes wonder why creationists harp on about being descended from monkeys – is it because their mental furniture can’t even address the idea that evolution also implies that we are descended from bacteria ?)

]]>By: Hoyvin-Mayvenhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153606
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:23:03 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/18/urban-astroninjas/#comment-153606Cool! Many years ago I used to live in a small town, however to get a really good view of the sky my dad and I took the telescope in the car and went to a small airfield which is rarely used. Away from artificial lights and with the sky being incredibly clear, the Milky Way was absolutely overwhelming. A huge river of stars from one horizon to the other. So many stars it was impossible to make out the constellations. Loved it.
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